Note 557 — Chapter XIX · ASSYRIANS. — BABYLON.

Herodot. i, 193. Ἡ γῆ τῶν Ἀσσυρίων ὕεται μὲν ὀλίγῳ—while he speaks of rain falling at Thebes in Egypt as a prodigy, which never happened except just at the moment when the country was conquered by Cambysês,—οὐ γὰρ δὴ ὕεται τὰ ἄνω τῆς Αἰγύπτου τὸ παράπαν (iii, 10). It is not unimportant to notice this distinction between the little rain of Babylonia, and the no rain of Upper Egypt,—as a mark of measured assertion in the historian from whom so much of our knowledge of Grecian history is derived.

It chanced to rain hard during the four days which the traveller Niebuhr spent in going from the ruins of Babylon to Bagdad, at the end of November 1763 (Reisen, vol. ii, p. 292).